A few years back, a fellow ceramics student at Casper College used to come and clean for me because he needed the money and I was damn sick of cleaning my own house. He was argumentative and cavalier with my stuff though, and on the day I found a couple of pieces of fossil oreodont jaw out in the dooryard where he had emptied the dustpan, I fired him and hired Dawn.
Dawn was a tattooed smartass of about 28, married with a young son and a husband who was an habitual petty criminal. They lived in Midwest Wyoming, an oil town that figured into the Teapot Dome oil scandal and that is now barely holding on in the face of the kind of oily, sulfurous neglect that rusts western towns where the pumpjacks outnumber the sober three to one. Dawn was coarse and untamed but conversely bright and funny. She seemed to have endless energy and she practiced yoga and exercised every morning to Jane Fonda’s workout tape. A dusty parade of kids and dogs tracked oilfield mud through her little house. She was the assistant at the preschool who taught swimming and bowling in summer to kids who would otherwise be bored into early crime or pregnancy. She liked to party though, and liked nothing better than to spark up a fatty with the roughneck oilfield and mining crowd she and her husband hung with. Join me below the fold.
Feminisms is a series of weekly feminist diaries. My fellow feminists and I decided to start our own for several purposes: we wanted a place to chat with each other, we felt it was important to both share our own stories and learn from others’, and we hoped to introduce to the community a better understanding of what feminism is about.
Needless to say, we expect disagreements to arise. We have all had different experiences in life, so while we share the same labels, we don’t necessarily share the same definitions. Hopefully, we can all be patient and civil with each other, and remember that, ultimately, we’re all on the same side.
First of all, please forgive my lateness with this diary. I have no excuse other than I absolutely forgot about it until I turned on the computer tonight. No ponies or cookies or anything else for me.
Let me continue.
Dawn would tell me the stories every time she came to clean, beginning from when she unloaded her favorite Electrolux vacuum and bucket of supplies to the moment she drove off in her old rusting pickup with its AC/DC sticker in the window. I was bewildered by the she said/he saids, incestuous family members, abusive boyfriends and tempestuous relationships this young woman had experienced but that largely seemed to have left her anything but discontented. She was a virtual tornado of energy, and when she was gone the house sparkled and felt really clean, as if it had been scrubbed of any darkness or bad feelings. That rough-and-tumble, self-described oilfield trash could take the actual as well as the spiritual dirt right out and scatter it to the ever-blowing Wyoming wind, and I felt blessed to have her.
Of course she had plans to better her life and didn’t want to clean houses forever. Her husband got caught yet again with weed in the glovebox and went away to Rawlins for a more prolonged sentence, and Dawn decided to make a break. She called to say she was divorcing him and moving on, and the last I heard of her she had remarried and moved out to Nebraska to start a new life. When I saw her emotion-lined face last week on the front page of the Casper Star-Tribune along with the headline Woman Shoots Husband I was stunned.
At first it appeared that she had been abused by her husband and after an afternoon of drink and argument she had decided to end the problem the way women have been doing these things for millennia, with the best tool at hand—which in this case was a loaded 45. But the details began to come out and it is now, according to the district attorney, a clear case of first degree murder. Dawn herself was the abuser of a "girlie-man" as she called the guy she had supposedly married and with whom she had moved away to begin anew. She depicted her husband as distraught and unhappy with his life, in fact very miserable. But the man’s family have now testified that not only was he fairly happy and content, it turns out that the couple were not married at all and several neighbors described an ugly relationship in which she "slapped him around" and verbally abused him. Perhaps he had finally had enough, because on the day Dawn killed him, he grasped her around the throat and told her to knock it off. Hours later he lay passed out from drinking in a recliner in the travel trailer they shared, and she evidently in a thoughtful mood. She thought about it, put the gun back in the drawer, then thought about it some more and put four slugs in him from 10 feet away.
We have discussed spousal and partner abuse in Feminisms before, but I am not sure we have touched on anything quite like this. What am I to believe about this bright but troubled woman adrift in the turbulent river of her life who, in a half-drunken discussion with her darker self, cut the frayed mooring that kept her from drowning? I know this: there but for the grace of (insert deity here) go I, as my biological mother was from Midwest herself. What would have happened to me had I not been put up for adoption 50 years ago, with my temperament and unsociability? Would I have grown up tough and angry, pregnant early with little chance at betterment? Would I have been the abused or the abuser? As of today I am still learning about myself and the debate between nature and nurture in my own choices. Had I grown up like Dawn, my life might mean little more than the death sentence that waits at the end of few appeals. I must keep in mind that she made her choices and knew what might become of her should she make the wrong ones, but it is difficult to understand how a woman might choose to take this way only to find herself in the county jail awaiting a fearful judgement. Remember that Dawn was not abused but was instead the abuser. She did not kill to defend herself but rather to "put him out of his misery,"—her words to the district attorney as to her motive. As this story unfolds, I’m sure more distressing details will come to light. Meanwhile I am hoping to gain enough courage to visit Dawn not only to offer support but also to see if I can glimpse any little bit of myself in her eyes.